Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Where both abortion and contraception are easily available and legal, fewer abortions are occurring--only (?) 41.6 million in 2003 compared to 45.5 million in 1995.

But unsafe abortion is still causing the deaths of 70,000 women per year.

70,000 too many.

"...In much of the developing world, abortion remains highly restricted, and unsafe abortion is common and continues to damage women's health and threaten their survival," reports Sharon Camp, president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Irene Vilar is a woman of courage and a married mother of two little girls aged three and five years.

At age 16 she began a relationship with a 50-year-old man who didn't want kids. She married him and for eleven years swung between desire to have children and fear of losing her husband. She also made several suicide attempts.

Now at age 40, with a new husband, she has had the courage to write the story of her life, which begins with her grandmother and mother in Puerto Rico and their struggle for control of their lives in a country under colonial control.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Would I understand it any better than my first sitar/raga experience last July in Varanasi on the steps above the Ganges River? Or would it be an impenetrable mass of musical artistry?

(I approached it with some tripping, too--my first attempt to wrap myself in a sari without the expert hands of an Indian friend.)

Nishat Khan, a seventh-generation player of sitar, sat before us on the stage at USC, explaining that each raga is composed of a tune about sixteen beats long, introduced and then improvised as the player is moved.

The good news: tuning the sitar took only five minutes, not fifty. Khan later explained that the tuning is actually part of the performance, like getting acquainted with small talk when you meet someone.

During the first raga, "Yaman," I was determined to note the central theme and follow the improvisation but, listening with the intensity of an arm wrestler, I never found it.

Khan moved on to a 170-year-old song, where I did catch the tune easily and enjoyed the variations, at times meditative, at times a frenzy of impossible virtuosity, like Eric Clapton on guitar.

After a third raga and the intermission, there were two more, "Sugre" and "Parovi," which began with the cry "Ta-di."

Khan explained that the entire words to this twenty-minute performance were the passionate demand of a girl to a boy: I want a red scarf--make my scarf red.

In Rajistan, he said, young men wear (wore?) a red turban, so she is saying she wants to marry him.

How this works in a society where marriages are arranged he didn't explain.

The performance was part of a conference in honor of the 140th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth, October 2, 1869.

For some reason the three performers (on sitar, tabla, and another guitar-like instrument) were all men, just as they had been in the concert I saw in India.

Yet the paintings and photos above on a screen included some female sitar players. Abby, who with her husband Davan had invited us, assured me that Ravi Shankar's daughter, Anoushka, plays the sitar.

Abby had another revelation for me: it's okay to sit there and relax, letting the music wash over you as your mind wanders, rather than strenuously trying to follow it.

I'll remember that next time, and my next sitar concert will include a female performer.

An amazing footnote: Abby and Davan's two kids, Armaan and Maya, 12 and 9 years old, sat through the whole performance without a complaint. My kids at those ages would have been squirming and asking to go to the bathroom.

I remember plying them with candy to sit through The Nutcracker Suite when they were 8, 5, and 3 years old.

Miguel Padilla, a 17-year-old who had lost half an arm in one accident and the sight in one eye in another, hung himself. Lazhanae Harris, 13, was stabbed to death. Both had been neglected and abandoned by birth parents before coming to the attention of the Department of Children and Family Services.

Their moving stories were written by Kim Christensen and Garrett Therolf. Read them and weep.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Emily Dickinson captured the ephemeral power of hope, and today the Nobel committee awarded this year's peace prize to President Barack Obama--for bringing renewed hope of peace to each person on the planet.

What a good day! "An imaginative and surprising" handling of this year's award, said Desmond Tutu, who won the prize in 1984.

And yes, an obvious "a kick in the leg" to the Bush administration's war policies, commented Thorbjorn Jagland, chair of the Nobel committee.

Just one year ago the immense political, economic, and military power of the USA was stuck in Belligerent Mode. American imperialism blew around the world unchecked like a cloud of poisonous gas.

But today a small bird perches in many souls "And sings the tune--without the words / And never stops at all."

When I was travelling in India last summer, I met people on the streets, the banks of the Ganges, the walkways of historic sites like the Taj Mahal who spoke fluent English--and others whose English was almost as limited as my Hindi.

But in every encounter, as soon as I identified my nationality, Indians spoke one word that brought smiles to all our faces.

"Obama!"

The t-shirt I happened to wear today says "Wage Peace" silk-screened over a blue-green planet earth.

Obama's greatest initiative in waging peace was his speech in Cairo last June. He spoke respectfully of Islam and quoted the Qu'ran, touching the hearts of all Muslims, who had been nearly equated with terrorists by the previous president.

To learn about Obama's decisive leadership in the writing of that speech, read the report of Christi Parsons in "The Making of a Message" (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 2, 2009). You can buy the article from the LA Times or access the full text through Proquest Newspapers if you have connection to an academic institution.

Parsons concludes with this measurement of the speech's impact:

Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, heard [from a friend in Cairo]... that on the day of the speech, he saw a little boy walking along the street, a smile on his face as he chanted in a soft, singsong voice: "Obama quoted the Koran. Obama quoted the Koran."

In memory of Martha Puebla & In honor of Maria Riveros

On a spring night in 2003, Martha Puebla, age 16, was shot in the face while sitting outside her home in Sun Valley, California, near Los Angeles. Her death was ordered by a gang member on trial for a murder she had witnessed.

On July 13, 2008, in San Ignacio, Paraguay, Maria Riveros took her pregnant 16-year-old daughter to the home of an obstetrician and asked her to perform an abortion. The fetus of about 4 mo. was buried outside the home, but there were complications and the next day Maria had to rush her daughter to a hospital, where a hysterectomy was performed. The obstetrician and her daughter, a nurse, were arrested and charged with performing an abortion.

This blog is dedicated to Martha, Maria and all women who courageously negotiate their lives in this world filled with gang warfare and international warfare, poverty and wealth, drug trafficking and addiction, and lack of access to birth control, legal abortion, and other health care.